Instead of a single reference question this week, I wanted to detail a series of unusual things that all happened on Friday - none of which had ever happened before.

A patron walked up with with a stack of about five books, and asked if she could leave them on the desk for a minute. Of course that was fine, and a couple minutes later she came back with another big stack. She then asked if she could put one of the stacks on hold, so she could pick them up tomorrow. That sounded odd, but then she explained that she had walked to the library and couldn't carry them all home in one trip. I suppose this is no different than someone placing items on hold from home, but I have never had a walk-up hold request like this before. But the best part was at the end - ask she was leaving, the patron said,

My daughter always tells me I have too many books, and I say you can never have too many books. I'm not going to tell her that she's right, but sometimes, you can have too many books... to carry.

A patron came up and asked for help using a flash drive on the computer. She said she wanted to work on a Word file that was on her drive, but when she plugged it in the drive was blank, and she was worried our computer erased all her files. When we got back to her workstation, initially I didn't see her flash drive even plugged into the computer, but then noticed it plugged into the USB ports built into the monitor. Those have never been hooked up, and in five years no one has tried to use them (or at least asked me about it). We moved her flash drive to one in the CPU, and everything was fine.

We recently added a public scanning station, which is just a regular flatbed scanner hooked to a computer. When we put it out, we decided we'd have a "scanner first" policy, meaning that if someone was using the computer but not the scanner, and another patron needed to use the scanner, we'd ask the non-scanning patron to move to a different computer. Today was the first time I had to do this.

A patron came in and said that her car was hit in the parking lot yesterday. It turns out, the library's truck was also hit in the parking lot yesterday, but was parked about as far away from the patron's car as you could get. We've never had a hit-and-run in our parking lot, so two in the same day is either a coincidence or one very bad driver careening all over the place. In neither case was the damage very bad, but still - bad driving and library parking lots is a bad combination.

Circ staff called me to the circ desk because a patron asked for help signing up for a SafeLink cell phone - but by the time I got there, the patron was gone. It turned out he only spoke Hindi, and one of our Hindi-speaking staff members was helping him. I checked on them at a computer, but they were doing fine - it's not often I'm dismissed from a reference interaction, especially a tech-support one, but I was absolutely irrelevant to this patron's need. Luckily, my co-worker wasn't.

Near the end of the day, the same patron from #2 came back up to the desk. She had been working on her Word document all day, and said her computer restarted and she lost everything, because it turned out she'd been saving her updated document to the computer, not to the flash drive. She had printed a draft shortly before the computer restarted, so she had most of it, but had to retype the whole thing, and ask me to show her how to save to her flash drive to make sure she didn't lose it again. However, scanner to the rescue! We took her printed draft to the scanner, which has a "scan to Word" OCR function, and in less than a minute had a new Word document for her (and saved on her flash drive). I can not tell you how happy this made her - scanner win!

And finally, the weirdest thing of all came when I checked my personal email right before I went home. In there, sent to my Swiss Army Librarian email address, was this message:

Hello, I am writing in an unusual case ... Some time ago, I used your services, and one of your employees face was familiar to me. At dinner with my wife, it turned out that he was a burglar, who 5 years ago broke into our home!!! This is ridiculous!!! How you can hire criminals? I found at least 3 bad entries for him at website for background check!! I am sure there are more!!! Please do something about it, things like that are ridiculous!!!

Now this seemed like spam, but just to be on the safe side, I looked the "from" email up in our catalog, and got no hits. I know spam is inexplicable much of the time, but this was just bizarre. And pointless.

So those were the highlights of my day on Friday. I guess this is more like a Library Day in the Life post than a reference question of the week, but it was an odd day.